Morten is a great example of the entrepreneurial spirit. He’s in it for the experience not the money. This is proven by his nonchelaunt response to his loss of about 40mm Euros from a print newspaper company that folded a few months ago. He’s quoted saying he was “happier as a poor student, than he was picking out a private jet, so who cares.” Try and get past his grunge euro appearance (which I think is pretty sweet) and listen to how brutally honest he is will his audience, his experience, and his passion.

Morten Lund speech at BIC 2008

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Google’s new chat service looks to be amazing. In all of my testing of video chat tools for ActionsTalk I’ve found that iChat on the Mac has the best video quality and Skype video chat is the quickest (less delays). Now I’ve tested Google chat against those two tools on those two criteria and it wins both. The video quality is really amazing especially when you keep the view at the default size (full screen is pretty sweet though). Also, the speed of the video is phenomenal! Blake and I use video chat all the time to collaborate on startup projects and I think we’ve found the tool that will replace the others. We used it for about an hour and it did freeze once though…I hardly consider this a FAIL…it’s early.

I’ve not tested out the record functionality yet but it looks like it is there… and the view yourself window if very flexible with sizing (a plus for recording).  I’ll definitely be giving Google video chat my attention over the next few days!

A quick note about Google: They seem to be able to enter a market so quickly and with such huge force. It is very possible that because of the large number of users on Gmail, services like Skype will have significant drops in users. Google is currently and will be for sometime a very scary force for ‘almost’ any startup. A startup can work for months or even years and spend tons of money on developing a product and can be put to rest in a matter of days if Google enters the market, BEWARE. However, startups should also see this as a huge opportunity. Why you ask? Because if Google wants to enter a market and you have a leading product $$$aquisitions bells start ringing$$$. The lesson here is beware and prepare Google ain’t slowin down.

Let me know what you think of the new Google video chat. Better, worse, better in some instances?

In this consumer web market of free, free, free there aren’t many things that you have to pay for. I use and am on the web A LOT and currently Flickr is the only web service that I pay for. I have a pro account so that I upload as many photos as I want and it is well worth the $25/year.

Last night I set up a Skype pro account for $29.95 for 12 months = $2.49/month. This will allow me to significantly save my cell minutes for work conference calls and catching up with my family in the evenings. I was already a regular user of the free video conversations but now I can take full advantage of all of Skype’s service.

If you want to chat on Skype I am ‘graves.ryan’.